Developing a new website is an exciting process, but the go-live process is often far less exciting!
Here's our go-to guide recommending best practices and strategies for your website's go-live!
Best practices
- Reduce the TTL on DNS records 48 hours before the migration to ensure quick propagation.
Make sure you do this on both the "www" record and the "naked domain" record (e.g. www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com).
Change the TTL value down to 120 (2 minutes). - Test your tools!
Make sure you have up to date SSH, MySQL and any other login credentials prior to the migration and have tested the connection. - Know your application software dependencies.
Prepare the new server environment with the required dependencies prior to the migration.
Go-live strategies
#1 Go live with your WordPress staging website
Arguably the fastest method of rearranging your hosting to push the staging site into production, however keep in mind it does overwrite your staging website.
#2 Migrate remote staging website to local hosting server
Using tools such as rsync or wget, this guide walks you through migrating a remotely hosted staging website to your local cPanel hosting server.
#3 Migrate remote transactional website to local server
With only 10 minutes of downtime and complete data retention!
Quick diagnosis checklist
- Ensure the database name, user and password is set correctly within the application configuration file
- Check the domain and directory path has been updated correctly in database
- Make sure the document root specified to the correct path
- The database user must be granted complete database permissions
- Verify the directory and file ownership and permissions are correct
- Ensure the PHP version and extension dependencies are enabled
- Always clear the website cache after any configuration change
- Perform a DNS lookup to ensure the domain is resolving to the correct IP address
- Verify the SSL certificate is installed and active
Last updated November 30, 2023